Announcing: Assassin Assignments and Merc Missions

The Battlerealm is in disarray. Thanos has been defeated, but the Grandmaster has been stripped of his power, and has gone missing! The Contest of Champions has descended into chaos, with many groups fighting for control. Many Champions have found themselves finding work as Mercenaries, using this chaos as a chance to make a quick buck. Amongst them, we find the legendary mutant mercenary, Domino hunting down the biggest and baddest, and she needs your help to bring in the most lucrative of scores!

Domino will have a steady stream of Assassin Assignment quests to Explore, and if you impress her enough on one of those, she may even give you and your whole Alliance a bigger contract: Merc Missions.
Assassin Assignments

Assassin Assignments are short quests that will appear throughout the day, and will be available for 4 hours at a time, before taking a 7 hour break. That means an Assassin Assignment will be available every 11 hours. Each Assignment consists of 2 paths, with each step only costing 1 energy each. You’ll get rewards for Completing and Exploring each difficulty level.

The number of fights to fully Explore each of these Quests varies with the difficulties, but the Master difficulty contains the most fights at 13. Once you start the Quest, you will only have 1 hour to complete it! Also, to add a little variety, there will be 2 different sets of Assignments that will cycle.

You’ll also find some chests along the way that either contain even more X-Force Crystal Shards, or a rare chance at an Ultimate X-Force Crystal!

Now, if a Summoner is able to fully Explore one of these Assignments, Domino may allow you and your whole Alliance take a crack at a Merc Mission!

Merc Missions

Merc Missions are Bounty Missions, which you may remember from their introduction as Tests of Valor in October. Merc Missions are short, 2 fight quests that are triggered randomly when you or an Alliance Member 100% Explores an Assassin Assignment. The higher the difficulty of an Assassin Assignment, the more likely it is that you will trigger a Merc Mission.
When Domino grants you a Merc Mission, it will become available to every member of your Alliance for 6 hours. If enough of your Alliance Members complete the Mission, you (or whoever initiated the Merc Mission) will receive bonus rewards!

The Merc Missions each consist of 4 difficulties, and although you can (and should) play through them all, you can only contribute to the completion once per Merc Mission. Also, keep in mind that there are no Exploration rewards for Merc Missions, so you only need to complete them once to get your rewards. Once you enter the Merc Mission, you’ll have 1 hour to complete it!

Merc Missions award 100 5-Star Shards to the Initiator of the Bounty Mission if 15 Alliance Members complete any difficulty level of the Mission.

You’ll be able to keep an eye on how many Alliance Members have completed a Merc Mission from a special Bounty Mission button on the Home Page, below the rotating banners. Once a Merc Mission has been triggered, another one cannot be triggered until the current one has expired.
But wait, last time these were pretty rare, and some Summoners didn’t have many chances to take part in the Tests of Valor. How have we improved it this time? Well, last time, it was based on collecting Valor, and the larger amounts you gained, the more likely you were to trigger a Test of Valor. Because you couldn’t trigger one when an Alliance Member already had, and the biggest chunks of Valor were to be found in the Event Quest, there was a lot of overlap, resulting in wasted chances. This time, it’s based strictly on Exploring Assassin Assignments, which means that as long as Summoners are continuously playing those events, your Alliance is more likely to trigger Merc Missions.

Let’s do a quick recap:

You’ll need to be in an Alliance to see and trigger Merc Missions.
You can potentially trigger a Merc Mission only by 100% Exploring Assassin Assignments.
You’ll have 6 hours to complete a Merc Mission once it is triggered.
There are 4 Difficulties of Merc Missions, but you only have to complete 1 once to contribute to your Alliance Member’s Initiator Bonus. Completing more will not contribute more.
Only one Merc Mission can be active at a time.
The higher the difficulty level of Assassin Assignment you Explore, the more likely you are to trigger a Merc Mission.
Triggering a Merc Mission opens that Mission for every member of your Alliance.Important Note: There is currently a bug affecting the timers in these modes. When entering these quests, you will see a pop-up telling you that you have 1 hour to complete the Quest or Mission. However, if there is less than 1 hour left before the Quest or Mission expires, it will still display 1 hour. The in game timer in the quest will still be accurate, so please pay attention to those!

Assassin Assignments and Merc Missions start June 6th at 10am Pacific Time, and will be available until July 2nd at 5pm Pacific Time! You must update to version 18.1 to be able to participate in these events.

Comments

We want to clarify something regarding the end of the event. This event ends on July 2nd at 5pm PDT. Any active Assassin Assignments or Merc Missions will end at that time. If you start a Merc Mission at 4:55 pm PDT on July 2nd, you will only have 5 minutes to complete the Mission.